11 ms·

Yea the smart play Microsoft is making is to go to businesses and say "look you could go with us or AWS.. AWS essentially says "good luck you're on your own" an

by xt00 10y ago

Yea the smart play Microsoft is making is to go to businesses and say "look you could go with us or AWS.. AWS essentially says "good luck you're on your own" and we will hold your hand and our premier support people will come to your business and set it all up for you and show your like 2 IT guys how to manage things.. They will make a ton of money on cloud because a huge amount of businesses are basically lagging behind the rest of the industry with cloud adoption and getting rid of their old servers and hosting services.

tracker1 10y ago
Just licensing alone for office is enough to drive a high adoption... $10/month/user is easier to account for in a billing cycle than $200-300/computer every two years.. the cost is more consistent for businesses, and the revenue is more consistent for MS... Likewise on Azure... Azure based ActiveDirectory, SQL as a service, and simpler deployments (compared to AWS) are a win... I've used Azure at a few positions, and am currently feeling like I'm pulling my hair out with AWS by comparison, just getting some simple deployment strategies. It feels like Azure strikes the "just right" experience better than aws. At least from my limited knowledge and experience.
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  Wait til you try GCE/GCP. It's so clean, smooth, fast, and cheap. The products so easy to work with. Azure is great targeting for MS's Enterprise customers but I've had nothing but problems. Terrible perf, weird products, and that horrible UI that just causes pain. I know at least 2 companies that have significant Azure credits but instead pay for GCP because Azure was just so painful.
  - shiftpgdn 10y ago
    God damn Azure performance is SO bad sometimes. I don't think they have the level of monitoring needed to clean up "bad neighbors" on shared servers. I've seen 2x performance increases by simply deleting a virtual machine and recreating it so it gets placed on a different box.
    - adiggo 10y ago
      i totally agree with u. Azure is horrible performance wise.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    GCE/GCP is really interesting, though I haven't had the opportunity to use it. I've said it a few times, but I'd LOVE to see a latency graph/map of the major cloud providers and latency/throughput to eachother's different data centers. This way when you have some services/data in one, and want to do something in another, you have an idea of what the cost in terms of time will be. ex: Compute/service/docker nodes in DO/Linode via Docker Cloud to manage the clusters, and use data services from azure/aws/gce. I mean, yes it's better to do in the same house/cloud, but for a hobby project where you'd like some redundancy 3x$20 nodes in DO + Azure SQL/Tables or AWS RDS/Aurora. So you don't have to manage your databases, but can save on the service nodes over EC2 or Azure VMs.
  - peteretep 10y ago
    But I probably won't try it because GCE/GCP is a distraction for Google rather than a core business, and I don't wanna do the migration again in two years when they drop it. This isn't marketing, it's trust. Trust that Google has repeatedly spunked up the wall with other products. It will take them years to unfuck that with companies that don't need the latest and shiniest.
jdc0589 10y ago
I've had better luck with the azure twitter account than premier support. Maybe I've just had bad luck, but in my (moderately limited) experience, premier support == guaranteed indian call center so they can meet the higher SLAs. Actual conversation with premier support: me: hey, it looks like the format of the billing report CSVs changed without any documentation or versioning. Can you confirm? Also, it looks like the line endings are now randomly intermixed between windows and linux style. Whats up with that? support: STOP OPENING THE CSVs IN EXCEL, IT CAN CORRUPT FORMATTING. me: good call, let me remove excel from our usage monitoring automation pipeline......sike.. Aside: I am convinced that EA billing/usage reports are manually generated via Mechanical Turk.
- Declanomous 10y ago
  Excel's handling of CSV's pisses me off. It will modify the actual file when you open it, even if you don't save. The entire office suite is horrible when it comes to preserving user data though. Access will change sql queries if you look at the code and close the query without saving or modifying anything. It's especially annoying when the query no longer works because Access 'helpfully' removed some parenthesis.
  - antisthenes 10y ago
    Do you know if LibreOffice modifies csv files in this manner, or is it 'safe' ?
    - pdwetz 10y ago
      I've never had it modify an opened file without me explicitly saving it.
  - curt15 10y ago
    What happens if you mark the file read-only?
  - bartread 10y ago
    I've never had that happen and I open a lot of CSVs in Excel.
iaw 10y ago
Would a good analogy be the IBM of cloud services?
- jjawssd 10y ago
  Is IBM even relevant anymore? Amazon is the leader here by a huge margin, Azure is a distant second, and the rest don't even register on the radar.
  - icpmacdo 10y ago
    You misinterpreted iaw's response. Its an analogy that Azure is IBM for the cloud.
    - iaw 10y ago
      Thank you. I assumed more people would know the history of IBM and how it maintained relevance through consulting work around it's enterprise products when it couldn't keep up with the PC market.
      - hyperpallium 10y ago
        Know your audience. Can you extend the analogy to the other players?
        paulddraper 10y ago
        "The jQuery of cloud computing"
  - Jdam 10y ago
    You and <cool SV startup> don't register that on the radar. But the random Fortune 500 big corp is pouring money into "Enterprise Clouds" like Oracle, IBM and SAP with embedded sales, consulting and support.
    - 10y ago
mbesto 10y ago
This is serving a large, and legitimate growing need in the market too. Not everyone can hire "Super DevOps Puppet, Ansible, Master" employees. AWS is going for pure volume. MSFT is going for customer service and "enterprise ready" (HIPAA, gov't, etc) GCP is a bit in no-man's land. Diane Greene appears to be heading it towards Azure, but it's very un-Google-like. (Google likes high margin businesses that can be support by technology solutions, not people)
- user5994461 10y ago
  Google Cloud is half the price, double the performances, and it has many major products/capabilities that are light years ahead and have zero equivalents in the other clouds. They're the unexpected player and they suck at marketing though :D
  - _benedict 10y ago
    Completely true, and deliciously ironic
    - hyperpallium 10y ago
      There's more to marketing than advertising, but yeah.
  - Jdam 10y ago
    And still, they cannot compete with AWS in terms of "completeness of vision" how Gartner puts it. And that is totally justified.
    - obulpathi 10y ago
      I worked with both Google Cloud and AWS. Having read Gartners Magic Quadrants on Cloud, I really question Gartners competency on understanding what Cloud really means. There is no question that Google Cloud is years ahead of AWS (ease of use, scalability, performance, vertical integration, networks, security ... ), but Gartner reports that AWS is leader. Bottomline: Don't trust what others say. Try out various cloud providers and decide for yourself, before diving head down and suffering with pain everyday.
kwillets 10y ago
MS's chief economist believes that basic cloud services will be commodity-priced, so the strategy is to add value, and both tools and services will be key for that.
- Cacti 10y ago
  Isn't it already commodity-priced?
  - sfeng 10y ago
    Depends on the specific service. Some are priced a % above cost (S3), others are priced a % below competition (data transfer), others are priced based on value (ML, text-to-speech, etc.).
  - user5994461 10y ago
    If you have $200k/£100k people who know how to handle it, yes.
  - xapata 10y ago
    There's no strict definition of what "commodity" pricing is. The market is competitive and the products are roughly comparable to each other, so it's reasonable to call them "commodity" products.
hazkz 10y ago
This is amusing in light of the fact that Microsoft apparently has many internal services running on old Dells in conference rooms[1] because the red tape to move them to the cloud is too much. [1] https://twitter.com/danluu/status/805828420575772672 https://twitter.com/danluu/status/805828420575772672
- Macha 10y ago
  Apparently a time honoured Microsoft tradition: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090114-00/?p=19493 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090114-00/?p=...
nunez 10y ago
AWS has a very good and mature support model and is very willing to work with businesses to make their offerings fit their needs. That combined with them having home field advantage will give Azure a long fight.
- 010a 10y ago
  I'm not as confident about this. In my experience, there are many "legacy" businesses who have adopted something as simple as Azure Active Directory, migrating off of their on-prem solution. Office 365 was, really, Microsoft's foot in the door to migrate people to Azure. Now, Azure AD is a foot in the door to other Azure services. And if Azure can come in and up-sell them on things like website and database hosting, with big support contracts to match, that's pretty huge. AWS will continue to dominate among more modern businesses who have developers on staff. But I genuinely think Azure will see a lot of success servicing legacy customers who are used to the microsoft ecosystem and don't have m/any developers on staff. All that being said; Personally: Azure is a pile of crap, with practically no redeeming qualities. I have no doubt it will do well with legacy businesses, but I really wish it wouldn't.
  - coverband 10y ago
    Agree that Azure AD is the magic key to get more businesses to adopt MS cloud solutions. I'm also seeing a lot of large businesses covering their bases by using Azure for Corp IT and dev/test environments, but set up production with AWS instances. Of course, this is only when they're used in a Infrastructure-as-a-Service setup, not if their apps consume platform-specific services. In addition, services like SCCM Cloud Gateway (for managing and patching remote users) only work through Azure. No doubt MS will continue to grow in this space, since it offers stability, support when things go south, as well as easy onboarding with various developer focused initiatives. While the variety of services doesn't match the AWS catalogue yet, they also offer a marketplace where 3rd party services can be purchased and integrated.
nugget 10y ago
Microsoft has embraced the start of a great 'bundling' phase as part of the market's often-repeated cycle of 'bundling and unbundling'. Seems like a smart strategy for their current situation. At some point in the future when the bundles become bloated, inefficient and/or lose product focus, new entrants will come and offer single-point 'unbundled' solutions as a means of further innovation. https://hbr.org/2014/07/marc-andreessen-and-jim-barksdale-on-how-to-make-money https://hbr.org/2014/07/marc-andreessen-and-jim-barksdale-on...
reggieband 10y ago
I can't agree more. I work in an enterprise place and we discuss this frequently. Even worse than AWS is Google, they just don't get the fact that Technical Managers at big enterprise places want hand-hold turn-key solutions. The amount of money they leave on the table is mind-bending. You go to Google and say "We need to do X" and they say "Here is product Y that connects to product Z, but you need to write your own connector." And each product has it's own pricing structure (one by CPU usage, one with flat fees, one based on throughput) so working out total cost is a nightmare. Then you have to hire around those techs, project manage the build of the infrastructure, etc. At that point you start to ask "Why are we using them again?" I've heard "Amazon and Google don't understand enterprise" at least a dozen times in the last couple of months. You don't hear that about Microsoft. Coming from a startup/open source/indie background I thought AWS and Google would be eating the world but at least in enterprise they appear to be missing a big opportunity.
- obulpathi 10y ago
  > "We need to do X" and they say "Here is product Y that connects to product Z, but you need to write your own connector." And each product has it's own pricing structure (one by CPU usage, one with flat fees, one based on throughput) so working out total cost is a nightmare. Then you have to hire around those techs, project manage the build of the infrastructure, etc. At that point you start to ask "Why are we using them again?" This is a feature(?) of AWS. Google Cloud provides fully built solutions for majority of use cases. AWS provides nuts and bolts and tell you to integrate them.
  - reggieband 10y ago
    > Google Cloud provides fully built solutions for majority of use cases. That is not my experience. In fact, you just need to look at the Google Cloud documentation solution use cases. For example: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/mobile/mobile-gaming-analysis-telemetry https://cloud.google.com/solutions/mobile/mobile-gaming-anal... (chosen more or less at random). You need: * Cloud pub/sub * Cloud dataflow * Big Query * Cloud datalab They don't stitch all that together for you. Nor do they have a good way of calculating how much each of those services will cost when used in conjunction with each other.
65827 10y ago
It's a smart play, I personally know of about ~$30million dollars that is just sitting around getting dusty simply because greenlit projects can't find any more AWS experts to get them actually out there. Once you have everything set up and a team of experts watching videos all day it's great, but many teams just aren't gonna get there.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  Wow. Sounds like an opportunity for startups, or for people who say they can't get jobs in the tech sector.
- siculars 10y ago
  The people are there. The pay is not.
  - devonkim 10y ago
    Additionally, it is extremely frustrating working with enterprises neck deep in technical debt located in the middle of nowhere oftentimes with really poor technical and organizational maturity teams trying to move into the cloud... in 2017. I've been doing the raindance of cloud migrations since 2009 and it's almost a net negative career path because instead of working on relatively new technology and concepts 60%+ of the time, you spend a lot of time working on long-outdated versions of everything, especially stacks that are in oversupply of labor or are so obscure you can't hire anymore (not a lot of Delphi folks out there despite its merits, sadly). So now to compete with peers not dealing with legacy as their literal job, I have to spend another 20+ hours / week to stay current with people who might actually work on somewhat modernized / greenfield systems that are just doing a 9-to-5 job and get paid maybe within a 15% gap. This is not the same thing as Javascript framework fatigue despite sounding like there's similar mechanics.
pixelcloud 10y ago
This is why we sell Azure and not AWS.. Amazon doesnt not care about enterprise business (unless you buy millions and millions direct from Amazon!)
hyperpallium 10y ago
I'm still a fan of "innovator's dilemma" and "crossing the chasm". It's about customer tolerance to the new: if new technology can be used by the same customers in the same way, incumbents win. But if it requires change in customers (different customers or different ways), then entrants win (incumbents being captured by their customers). Therefore, I'd have thought MS would lose here... unless they can make the cloud be used like desktop apps.
AlexB138 10y ago
This is actually the gap Rackspace is rebranding themselves to fill. They're now trying to sell their "fanatical support" brand, for whatever it's worth anymore, as expert guidance on top of AWS (and Azure). I think it was a pretty savvy move for them. I'm an ex-Racker.
lazylizard 10y ago
personally i find it interesting that..if i'm on my own, then i might as well be really on my own..own my own racks, servers, networking, mail, ldap, etc.. and tech like virtualisation and config management are making it easier than ever..

by xt00 10y ago

tracker1 10y ago

Just licensing alone for office is enough to drive a high adoption... $10/month/user is easier to account for in a billing cycle than $200-300/computer every two years.. the cost is more consistent for businesses, and the revenue is more consistent for MS... Likewise on Azure... Azure based ActiveDirectory, SQL as a service, and simpler deployments (compared to AWS) are a win... I've used Azure at a few positions, and am currently feeling like I'm pulling my hair out with AWS by comparison, just getting some simple deployment strategies. It feels like Azure strikes the "just right" experience better than aws. At least from my limited knowledge and experience.

MichaelGG 10y ago
Wait til you try GCE/GCP. It's so clean, smooth, fast, and cheap. The products so easy to work with. Azure is great targeting for MS's Enterprise customers but I've had nothing but problems. Terrible perf, weird products, and that horrible UI that just causes pain. I know at least 2 companies that have significant Azure credits but instead pay for GCP because Azure was just so painful.
- shiftpgdn 10y ago
  God damn Azure performance is SO bad sometimes. I don't think they have the level of monitoring needed to clean up "bad neighbors" on shared servers. I've seen 2x performance increases by simply deleting a virtual machine and recreating it so it gets placed on a different box.
  - adiggo 10y ago
    i totally agree with u. Azure is horrible performance wise.
- tracker1 10y ago
  GCE/GCP is really interesting, though I haven't had the opportunity to use it. I've said it a few times, but I'd LOVE to see a latency graph/map of the major cloud providers and latency/throughput to eachother's different data centers. This way when you have some services/data in one, and want to do something in another, you have an idea of what the cost in terms of time will be. ex: Compute/service/docker nodes in DO/Linode via Docker Cloud to manage the clusters, and use data services from azure/aws/gce. I mean, yes it's better to do in the same house/cloud, but for a hobby project where you'd like some redundancy 3x$20 nodes in DO + Azure SQL/Tables or AWS RDS/Aurora. So you don't have to manage your databases, but can save on the service nodes over EC2 or Azure VMs.
- peteretep 10y ago
  But I probably won't try it because GCE/GCP is a distraction for Google rather than a core business, and I don't wanna do the migration again in two years when they drop it. This isn't marketing, it's trust. Trust that Google has repeatedly spunked up the wall with other products. It will take them years to unfuck that with companies that don't need the latest and shiniest.

jdc0589 10y ago

I've had better luck with the azure twitter account than premier support. Maybe I've just had bad luck, but in my (moderately limited) experience, premier support == guaranteed indian call center so they can meet the higher SLAs. Actual conversation with premier support: me: hey, it looks like the format of the billing report CSVs changed without any documentation or versioning. Can you confirm? Also, it looks like the line endings are now randomly intermixed between windows and linux style. Whats up with that? support: STOP OPENING THE CSVs IN EXCEL, IT CAN CORRUPT FORMATTING. me: good call, let me remove excel from our usage monitoring automation pipeline......sike.. Aside: I am convinced that EA billing/usage reports are manually generated via Mechanical Turk.

Declanomous 10y ago
Excel's handling of CSV's pisses me off. It will modify the actual file when you open it, even if you don't save. The entire office suite is horrible when it comes to preserving user data though. Access will change sql queries if you look at the code and close the query without saving or modifying anything. It's especially annoying when the query no longer works because Access 'helpfully' removed some parenthesis.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  Do you know if LibreOffice modifies csv files in this manner, or is it 'safe' ?
  - pdwetz 10y ago
    I've never had it modify an opened file without me explicitly saving it.
- curt15 10y ago
  What happens if you mark the file read-only?
- bartread 10y ago
  I've never had that happen and I open a lot of CSVs in Excel.

iaw 10y ago

Would a good analogy be the IBM of cloud services?

jjawssd 10y ago
Is IBM even relevant anymore? Amazon is the leader here by a huge margin, Azure is a distant second, and the rest don't even register on the radar.
- icpmacdo 10y ago
  You misinterpreted iaw's response. Its an analogy that Azure is IBM for the cloud.
  - iaw 10y ago
    Thank you. I assumed more people would know the history of IBM and how it maintained relevance through consulting work around it's enterprise products when it couldn't keep up with the PC market.
    - hyperpallium 10y ago
      Know your audience. Can you extend the analogy to the other players?
      - paulddraper 10y ago
        "The jQuery of cloud computing"
- Jdam 10y ago
  You and <cool SV startup> don't register that on the radar. But the random Fortune 500 big corp is pouring money into "Enterprise Clouds" like Oracle, IBM and SAP with embedded sales, consulting and support.
  - 10y ago

mbesto 10y ago

This is serving a large, and legitimate growing need in the market too. Not everyone can hire "Super DevOps Puppet, Ansible, Master" employees. AWS is going for pure volume. MSFT is going for customer service and "enterprise ready" (HIPAA, gov't, etc) GCP is a bit in no-man's land. Diane Greene appears to be heading it towards Azure, but it's very un-Google-like. (Google likes high margin businesses that can be support by technology solutions, not people)

user5994461 10y ago
Google Cloud is half the price, double the performances, and it has many major products/capabilities that are light years ahead and have zero equivalents in the other clouds. They're the unexpected player and they suck at marketing though :D
- _benedict 10y ago
  Completely true, and deliciously ironic
  - hyperpallium 10y ago
    There's more to marketing than advertising, but yeah.
- Jdam 10y ago
  And still, they cannot compete with AWS in terms of "completeness of vision" how Gartner puts it. And that is totally justified.
  - obulpathi 10y ago
    I worked with both Google Cloud and AWS. Having read Gartners Magic Quadrants on Cloud, I really question Gartners competency on understanding what Cloud really means. There is no question that Google Cloud is years ahead of AWS (ease of use, scalability, performance, vertical integration, networks, security ... ), but Gartner reports that AWS is leader. Bottomline: Don't trust what others say. Try out various cloud providers and decide for yourself, before diving head down and suffering with pain everyday.

kwillets 10y ago

MS's chief economist believes that basic cloud services will be commodity-priced, so the strategy is to add value, and both tools and services will be key for that.

Cacti 10y ago
Isn't it already commodity-priced?
- sfeng 10y ago
  Depends on the specific service. Some are priced a % above cost (S3), others are priced a % below competition (data transfer), others are priced based on value (ML, text-to-speech, etc.).
- user5994461 10y ago
  If you have $200k/£100k people who know how to handle it, yes.
- xapata 10y ago
  There's no strict definition of what "commodity" pricing is. The market is competitive and the products are roughly comparable to each other, so it's reasonable to call them "commodity" products.

hazkz 10y ago

This is amusing in light of the fact that Microsoft apparently has many internal services running on old Dells in conference rooms[1] because the red tape to move them to the cloud is too much. [1] https://twitter.com/danluu/status/805828420575772672 https://twitter.com/danluu/status/805828420575772672

Macha 10y ago
Apparently a time honoured Microsoft tradition: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090114-00/?p=19493 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090114-00/?p=...

nunez 10y ago

AWS has a very good and mature support model and is very willing to work with businesses to make their offerings fit their needs. That combined with them having home field advantage will give Azure a long fight.

010a 10y ago
I'm not as confident about this. In my experience, there are many "legacy" businesses who have adopted something as simple as Azure Active Directory, migrating off of their on-prem solution. Office 365 was, really, Microsoft's foot in the door to migrate people to Azure. Now, Azure AD is a foot in the door to other Azure services. And if Azure can come in and up-sell them on things like website and database hosting, with big support contracts to match, that's pretty huge. AWS will continue to dominate among more modern businesses who have developers on staff. But I genuinely think Azure will see a lot of success servicing legacy customers who are used to the microsoft ecosystem and don't have m/any developers on staff. All that being said; Personally: Azure is a pile of crap, with practically no redeeming qualities. I have no doubt it will do well with legacy businesses, but I really wish it wouldn't.
- coverband 10y ago
  Agree that Azure AD is the magic key to get more businesses to adopt MS cloud solutions. I'm also seeing a lot of large businesses covering their bases by using Azure for Corp IT and dev/test environments, but set up production with AWS instances. Of course, this is only when they're used in a Infrastructure-as-a-Service setup, not if their apps consume platform-specific services. In addition, services like SCCM Cloud Gateway (for managing and patching remote users) only work through Azure. No doubt MS will continue to grow in this space, since it offers stability, support when things go south, as well as easy onboarding with various developer focused initiatives. While the variety of services doesn't match the AWS catalogue yet, they also offer a marketplace where 3rd party services can be purchased and integrated.

nugget 10y ago

Microsoft has embraced the start of a great 'bundling' phase as part of the market's often-repeated cycle of 'bundling and unbundling'. Seems like a smart strategy for their current situation. At some point in the future when the bundles become bloated, inefficient and/or lose product focus, new entrants will come and offer single-point 'unbundled' solutions as a means of further innovation. https://hbr.org/2014/07/marc-andreessen-and-jim-barksdale-on-how-to-make-money https://hbr.org/2014/07/marc-andreessen-and-jim-barksdale-on...

reggieband 10y ago

I can't agree more. I work in an enterprise place and we discuss this frequently. Even worse than AWS is Google, they just don't get the fact that Technical Managers at big enterprise places want hand-hold turn-key solutions. The amount of money they leave on the table is mind-bending. You go to Google and say "We need to do X" and they say "Here is product Y that connects to product Z, but you need to write your own connector." And each product has it's own pricing structure (one by CPU usage, one with flat fees, one based on throughput) so working out total cost is a nightmare. Then you have to hire around those techs, project manage the build of the infrastructure, etc. At that point you start to ask "Why are we using them again?" I've heard "Amazon and Google don't understand enterprise" at least a dozen times in the last couple of months. You don't hear that about Microsoft. Coming from a startup/open source/indie background I thought AWS and Google would be eating the world but at least in enterprise they appear to be missing a big opportunity.

obulpathi 10y ago
> "We need to do X" and they say "Here is product Y that connects to product Z, but you need to write your own connector." And each product has it's own pricing structure (one by CPU usage, one with flat fees, one based on throughput) so working out total cost is a nightmare. Then you have to hire around those techs, project manage the build of the infrastructure, etc. At that point you start to ask "Why are we using them again?" This is a feature(?) of AWS. Google Cloud provides fully built solutions for majority of use cases. AWS provides nuts and bolts and tell you to integrate them.
- reggieband 10y ago
  > Google Cloud provides fully built solutions for majority of use cases. That is not my experience. In fact, you just need to look at the Google Cloud documentation solution use cases. For example: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/mobile/mobile-gaming-analysis-telemetry https://cloud.google.com/solutions/mobile/mobile-gaming-anal... (chosen more or less at random). You need: * Cloud pub/sub * Cloud dataflow * Big Query * Cloud datalab They don't stitch all that together for you. Nor do they have a good way of calculating how much each of those services will cost when used in conjunction with each other.

65827 10y ago

It's a smart play, I personally know of about ~$30million dollars that is just sitting around getting dusty simply because greenlit projects can't find any more AWS experts to get them actually out there. Once you have everything set up and a team of experts watching videos all day it's great, but many teams just aren't gonna get there.

WalterBright 10y ago
Wow. Sounds like an opportunity for startups, or for people who say they can't get jobs in the tech sector.
siculars 10y ago
The people are there. The pay is not.
- devonkim 10y ago
  Additionally, it is extremely frustrating working with enterprises neck deep in technical debt located in the middle of nowhere oftentimes with really poor technical and organizational maturity teams trying to move into the cloud... in 2017. I've been doing the raindance of cloud migrations since 2009 and it's almost a net negative career path because instead of working on relatively new technology and concepts 60%+ of the time, you spend a lot of time working on long-outdated versions of everything, especially stacks that are in oversupply of labor or are so obscure you can't hire anymore (not a lot of Delphi folks out there despite its merits, sadly). So now to compete with peers not dealing with legacy as their literal job, I have to spend another 20+ hours / week to stay current with people who might actually work on somewhat modernized / greenfield systems that are just doing a 9-to-5 job and get paid maybe within a 15% gap. This is not the same thing as Javascript framework fatigue despite sounding like there's similar mechanics.

pixelcloud 10y ago

This is why we sell Azure and not AWS.. Amazon doesnt not care about enterprise business (unless you buy millions and millions direct from Amazon!)

hyperpallium 10y ago

I'm still a fan of "innovator's dilemma" and "crossing the chasm". It's about customer tolerance to the new: if new technology can be used by the same customers in the same way, incumbents win. But if it requires change in customers (different customers or different ways), then entrants win (incumbents being captured by their customers). Therefore, I'd have thought MS would lose here... unless they can make the cloud be used like desktop apps.

AlexB138 10y ago

This is actually the gap Rackspace is rebranding themselves to fill. They're now trying to sell their "fanatical support" brand, for whatever it's worth anymore, as expert guidance on top of AWS (and Azure). I think it was a pretty savvy move for them. I'm an ex-Racker.

lazylizard 10y ago

personally i find it interesting that..if i'm on my own, then i might as well be really on my own..own my own racks, servers, networking, mail, ldap, etc.. and tech like virtualisation and config management are making it easier than ever..